A project of the Tides Center, One Nation Working Together (ONWT) was established in 2010 to inject new energy into the social justice movement in advance of that year's mid-term elections. The project's signature event was its October 2, 2010 “March on Washington,” whose purpose was to inspire “an intensive voter-mobilization program for Election Day 2010.” Headquartered in the Washington, DC offices of USAction, ONWT also coordinated some of its activities out of the New York City offices of the Service Employee International Union (SEIU).

ONWT's steering committee liaison was Rosalyn Pelles, former director of the AFL-CIO’s Civil, Human and Women’s Rights Department. A onetime black-liberation activist, Pelles was a signatory to the 1998 call for the formation of a Black Radical Congress as a means of reviving social militancy among African Americans.

The ONWT project's three central pillars were jobs, education, and “equality for all.” While the project claimed that “putting America back to work” was its primary focus, the vast majority of its proposals on this issue dealt with increasing direct relief benefits to the unemployed, expanding the public sector, and unionizing the workplace.

Specifically, ONWT's platform called for the following key items, whose most commonly shared feature was their call for increased government intervention and taxpayer-dollar expenditures: